IT HAPPENED ON THE STAIRS
Just as I was learning the concept of “post-post-modern” which some call “metamodern”, I stumbled onto a popular online court series called “The Stairs” which embodied many of the relevant qualities. A writer was accused of murdering his wife; a composite society assembled as judge, jury, prosecutor, defendant, and families; but in spite of being considered over years that included prison time for the writer, a trial failed to resolve the original goal. Simply, a woman named Kathleen died at the foot of winding stairs with no witnesses. Why? Did her husband kill her?
All of this was recorded by French videographers and interpreted both in court and privately as self-expressing soliloquies of eloquence and irony. Watching the thirteen 45-minute episodes — filmed in clusters over the years — takes days. Michael Peterson, the accused, was a kind of man I’ve known over my lifetime as actors, artists, writers, lawyers, architects, academics, and Unitarian ministers, one of whom was often kidded by his peers for saying “nothing human is foreign to me.”
Peterson did not have a jury of his peers but rather an assortment of citizens of the community, mixed black and white, male and female. They were not interviewed, so their points of view are speculative. The judge was black and the time, fifteen years, was so long that the difference between his early self — defensive and determined to control — was not the same as his end-point self — aware of having been rebuked, accepting of his errors, experienced in where the limits of a fair trial should be. His final statement is almost Shakespearean. He must be given credit for allowing the videographer to film, though there’s an element of arrogance in that.
The most distinct complexifications came from Peterson’s newspaper writing having been in opposition to the very same local prosecutors now pursuing his case. His presentation was as that mysterious and rather sinister popular role, a writer about sex, death, and war. He was a bit apart and unconventional in a place where history had assembled remnants of colonial empire, economic dependence on slavery, and a haven for sophisticated retirees, often academic. Peterson’s writing career developed in part from his education in the legal field — not as a lawyer — and his Vietnam experience.
In the course of that combat time he had become very close to George Ratliff, a handsome fellow officer, while their two wives also were in a close sharing friendship, which Peterson’s wife described as more valuable than her marriage. The two couples formed a four-point cluster, stationed after the war in Germany, and in the end shared the raising and love of their children. One of the men died in an accident and Peterson stepped up to help the wife, who then died falling down stairs after episodes suggesting stroke that could have caused the fall. Peterson ended being dad to the four children, half his genetically and half his emotionally.
This earlier background should probably not have been allowed in evidence since it suggested serial murder via falls on stairs and introduced Peterson’s man-on-man sex intervals, which I hesitate to describe as “gay.” I doubt that many jurors realized that after the Kinsey report came out with its frank surveys of men, it was established that man-on-man sexual encounters were far more common than anyone had guessed. I doubt that any of them thought about what testosterone and adrenaline combined will do to the sex drive of men in combat. According to Wikipedia, military files verified that Peterson received a Silver Star and the Bronze Star Medal with Valor. I’ve never read his writing.
A couple of years after these tragedies, Peterson found a new partner, Kathleen, and included her and her daughter in his life. Kathleen’s sisters and daughter formed a formidable team of prosecution, in particular Candace, expensively dressed and coiffed, and passionately demanding recompense for her anguish, framed as justice, a modern maenad who intimidated the prosecution.
The two protagonists of the series are Peterson and his lawyer, discovered by Peterson’s brother who was also a lawyer. I’m unclear about who engaged the French who are quiet about their own opinions. The lawyer, David Rudolf, was an American type, the Jewish lawyer in pursuit of justice, highly reflexive, self-criticizing but determined. produced by the sequence of Nazi persecution, family flight to Manhattan that preserved classic values, and intense education. He was a potent game player and reframed his practice after this trial to specialize in defending the unjustly accused. He becomes as vividly cultural romantic as Peterson.
There were two amazing wild cards. One was that the chief prosecution witness, a self-proclaimed expert called Steiner, was revealed after the trial to have faked lab results and conspired with the prosecution, including the autopsy testimony, to ensure conviction. He had lied about many trials and probably that ought have to triggered a mistrial verdict.
The other element was totally surprising and did not “compute” to anyone involved until too late. Why did Kathleen fall down the stairs that late night? She was a little drunk, a little drugged, and had head wounds that lacerated the skin (scalps are notorious for being copious sources of blood) but did not cause concussions as would result from being struck. In fact, one wound was described as being a “flap”, as though the skin had been lifted rather than pounded. The wounds were on the top of Kathleen’s head, strange for a fall.
Too late, a local naturalist suggested that a barred owl, a big bird with strong talons, had attacked Kathleen, maybe in a frantic attempt to get back out of the house after trying to find a roost there as a barn owl conventionally does. Though that in itself would not be enough to kill her directly, the blood loss and fall would be lethal. It was suggested that tiny bits of feather were mixed with tufts of her pulled out hair, but this was not confirmed by lab reports.
The other element that I thought was neglected was the interval between the time Kathleen left the pool area where she and Peterson had been relaxing, and the time when he called 911. It was described as being so long that the blood had dried. The wall showed signs of wiping, there was a bloody footprint on Kathleen’s sweatpants but we aren’t told whose foot, and the bottoms of her own feet were coated in blood as though she had slipped in the puddle of it.
No one ever considered PTSD, the impact on a combat veteran of finding his wife dead or near death. His 911 call was confused and incoherent. He may have blacked out, denied, only kept sanity in flashes. To him — and I must say, other men like him — Kathleen was the core and stability of his being. That loss was arguably worse than the conviction. The family they had formed together was his salvation but he was badly broken.
Both men have profited from the interest in this trial. It’s ambiguity, the prurient aspects, and the privileged setting have intrigued many people. But it has not been much discussed as an example of the progression of concepts meant to sum up the sense of our “age” as “metamodern”, a time of shattering and competing cultures that cause injustice, absurdity, and passion, all judging each other and trying to achieve understanding, as in our governing dilemmas today. It’s a temptation to say that Covid-19 is the big owl that attacked us out of nowhere.
