Feathers in Her Hand

I’m a sucker for anything true crime-related, so when I saw the documentary The Staircase by Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, I was immediately intrigued. Though the case dates back to 2001, I had never heard of it before a year ago.

The Death

On December 9th, 2001, the wife of novelist Michael Peterson was found at the bottom of the stairs, copious amounts of blood surrounding her and strange gash marks on her head. According to Peterson, she was alive but incoherent when he found her, and she died soon after. Prior to this event, Peterson and his wife had been enjoying drinks outside by the pool at their home. Kathleen went to go inside for the night and according to his account, Michael stayed out a bit longer before also going inside and finding her in a pool of her own blood.

There is an uneasy feeling throughout the documentary, which charts the time between Kathleen Peterson’s mysterious death in 2001 and Michael Peterson being released from prison in 2017. The legal proceedings throughout are focused on in detail, and it’s a fascinating look at American court systems. Ultimately, in 2003, despite the efforts of the defense, Peterson was convicted of murder in the first degree. He spent years in jail until he submitted an Alford Plea in 2017, which allowed him to publicly insist on his innocence while getting his charge dropped to voluntary manslaughter (in so doing officially accepting the court verdict of guilty.) He lives in the same town of Durham, North Carolina to this day, though in a different house, and still maintains his claim of innocence.

One thing the documentary never gave me was a satisfying enough answer to what actually happened. The circumstances around this case seemed flat-out incriminating from afar, but downright odd and disjointed when put under a microscope.

The theories presented in the Netflix series are that either Michael Peterson attacked his wife- leaving the marks on her head and causing her to fall down the stairs- or alternatively, that she fell on her own, by accident, hitting something or other on the way down that created the damage to her scalp. Both were full of inexplicable holes. How did one get such gash-like injuries from a fall? But if Kathleen Peterson was killed by her husband, why was he not covered in her blood as well? (no evidence was found that a change of clothes had taken place).

It leaves you just as it began, with that uneasy feeling that the truth was still swimming out there, beyond grasp.

When this challenge came out, this was one of the first cases that rose to the top of the churning waters in my mind, so I went with it. I turned to the internet just to refresh my facts on the details of the case. That’s when I found something that, for me, blew the case wide open again.

It was something commonly referred to as “The Owl Theory.”

The Staircase

At first glance, the premise- that an owl was the true perpetrator of the crime, attacking Kathleen and causing her to fall down the stairs and bleed out, sounded absolutely laughable.

But when I actually looked at the evidence, all the little things that had never added up before started to actually… click.

• For one, the marks on her face look very odd for someone being attacked by another human being, and certainly for someone who'd taken a fall on the stairs. They look like small puncture wounds, as if from the claws - or beak- of an animal.

• Owl specialists looked at the shape of the marks on the back of Kathleen's head, and said it was consistent with an owl attack. They even conducted an experiment with a clay cap and a real owl, to see if the marks would match up. They did.

• There were traces of blood outside the house on the walkway and by the door that suggest Kathleen was outside around the front of the house at some point and possibly the initial attack happened there rather than on the staircase.

• Blood was lacking from the top of the stairs, instead confined to the bottom. This, to me, suggests she started to go up but never reached the top before falling and not being able to get up again due to the amount of blood loss she was suffering.

• Apparently, and most strikingly when Kathleen’s body was examined, she had small feathers in her hand, along with pieces of her own hair, a twig and copious amounts of blood. How something as ‘weird’ as this could be passed over as inconsequential is bizarre to me.

The Owl

Another thing- the owl theory didn’t come to light the way most crime theories do, from the swirling abyss of the internet. It was actually first put forward by the Petersons’ neighbor, Larry Pollard, who thought the marks on Kathleen looked consistent with an owl attack.

Owls attacking a person out of the blue? Yeah, right.

ACTUALLY: some species like Barred Owls, which Pollard speculated had caused Kathleen’s mysterious head injuries, are known to do exactly that. In order to protect their territory, at times these birds will swoop down and grab at the head or face of a person who is a perceived threat to them. Barred owls, of which there were many in the area the Petersons lived, are even known to attack people without provocation. The overwhelming majority of these attacks will not be fatal. But there is an exception to every rule, and it is not unheard of for someone to be seriously injured or killed by an owl attack.

Kathleen was proposed to have been outside, moving decorations when the owl swooped at her. This is just my speculation, but I think it likely this was just an incredibly unlucky scenario. The owl gets caught in her hair, explaining the clumps found in her own hand as she tried to pull it out. Its scratches and attack become more frantic as with any caught animal.

Talon injuries to the head causing bleeding out? Yeah, right.

EXCEPT: the scalp is actually one of the most dangerous places to obtain a deep cut, being full of blood vessels and prone to bleeding profusely when injured. This can sometimes be fatal.

Furthermore, Kathleen had been drinking beforehand and had medication in her system which interfered with the ability of blood to clot, making her more susceptible to bleeding out faster.

The Truth?

I’ve watched enough true crime accounts to know that when a spouse calls hysterical about the death of their partner, it’s automatically assumed that they are the perpetrator of the crime.

Often, this is correct. It’s alarming how many people kill their significant others (and an odd amount of them subsequently call in, as though that puts them beyond the veil of suspicion). So it’s understandable that initially, the natural assumption to make in this case was that Michael Peterson killed his wife; there was, after all, no one in the house but the two of them, and the injuries to Kathleen’s head made the theory of a fall questionable.

But what gets me here (and what can be seen in the documentary) is how biased people were at the outset, one hundred percent believing the word was murder. The prosecution even dug into things like Peterson’s bisexuality to attempt to explain his motives. Yet still, something like the presence of the feathers did not warrant further investigation on either side at the time it was introduced (2009); it was dismissed as a crack theory. Everyone was ready to believe that Peterson killed his wife from the beginning, and I think this caused them to skip over the devil in the details.

I’d be very curious to know how Michael Peterson, if he is innocent as he claims, thinks of this theory. His lawyer, David Rudolph, acknowledged later on that he saw some validity in the theory and said that he would have brought it up in court but the timing was wrong- he’d been introduced to it too late into the proceedings. He even wrote a blog addressing it.

Though we’ll never know for sure what happened to Kathleen Peterson, I became very intrigued by the owl theory and it went from sounding like a ridiculous idea to the only explanation that satisfied all the plot holes in the story of this horrifying incident. Is it possible this is not a crime at all but a tragedy brought about by a happenstance of nature?

The more I read about this theory, the more likely it seemed, and I have to say that personally, I’m in camp Owl now.

{ if you liked this article, or if it just gave you a new and potentially problematic fear of owls, please consider dropping a heart below- it means the world to me! Tips are hugely appreciated though of course not expected. Until next time xx RAIST }

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