
Dateline NBC is airing a two-hour special Friday night on Michael Peterson, the one-time Durham socialite turned convicted killer.
Last month, Peterson entered an Alford plea to the charge of voluntary manslaughter for the death of his wife, Kathleen, in 2001. The plea allowed the novelist to accept a guilty verdict in what had been one of the longest trials in North Carolina history without admitting guilt.
According to a press release from NBC, โDown the Back Staircase โ will include interviews with Peterson as well as Kathleenโs sister, Candace Zamperini; Petersonโs daughters, Martha Ratliff and Margaret Ratliff; Petersonโs brother, Bill Peterson; Detective Art Holland; former Assistant District Attorney Freda Black; Petersonโs defense attorney, David Rudolf; and Kathleenโs daughter, Caitlin Atwater. (Atwater spoke to the INDY about her mother prior to Petersonโs plea deal.)
Dateline is billing the special, featuring correspondent Dennis Murphy, as โone of the most compelling mysteries weโve ever covered as you havenโt heard it before.โ In a clip, Peterson tells Murphy that taking the plea last month was โthe most difficult decision I ever made in my life.โ
Peterson has maintained for fifteen years that he not did kill his wife. He was convicted of murdering her in 2003, but that conviction was overturned in 2011 after a judge ruled that an SBI agent had misled jurors about his findings analyzing the blood at the Petersonโs Cedar Street home. Peterson was granted a retrial that was scheduled for May 2017. Instead, Peterson took the Alford plea, which let him walk out of Durham County Superior Court on February 24 a free man, having already served more than eight years in prison.


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