Fourteen Years Ago, Michael Peterson Was Convicted of Killing Her Mother. Now, Caitlin Atwater Breaks Her Silence in an Exclusive Interview.

I turn in to the driveway that leads to 1810 Cedar Street and it hits me. I’ve navigated this stretch before—on New Year’s Eve and prom night, to attend lavish pool parties and join middle school study sessions—but this time, it’s different.

The massive trees that guard the entrance to the property are still standing. The nine-thousand-square-foot Southern mansion up ahead is just as imposing as I remember. But the young woman standing in the doorway, my oldest childhood friend, has changed since the last time I saw her, when we headed back to college for the beginning of sophomore year a few months earlier, her to Cornell, me to N.C. State.

The Caitlin Atwater I’d known before had a certain glow. She was put together and upbeat. Her blonde hair was vibrant. She’d welcome you with a smile and a quip. But today she’s run-down. Caitlin was always slender, but she seems to have lost weight. Her eyes reveal that she’s been crying, that she hasn’t slept in days.

Of course she hasn’t.

Her mother, Kathleen Peterson, a Nortel Networks vice president, had died a few days earlier, on December 9, 2001, the victim of a bizarre accident, a fall down the stairs. Or so she believes. This is Caitlin’s first day back at her Durham home since a sorority sister delivered the news. She doesn’t want to be alone.

Inside, the Peterson house doesn’t feel the same. There’s no hint of the Christmas to come, of the special batch of shortbread cookies dusted with powdered sugar Kathleen made every year. We don’t talk much as we pass the grand staircase located just inside the front door. An eerie silence now pervades a house that, with three girls and two extroverted adults living there, had always been abuzz.

When we make our way down the long hardwood hallway that leads to the kitchen, past the spot where her mother had taken her last breath, Caitlin keeps her head down. She doesn’t break down when we pass the boarded-up entrance to a staircase we used to flock to as kids (we were fascinated by the handicap seat that ran along the railing), even though she knows that, beyond the plywood, Kathleen’s blood still coats the walls.

In the kitchen, she pours us a glass of sweet white wine. The counters are covered in a hodgepodge of liquor and wine bottles, casseroles, cards, flowers, and other items brought by friends and family members. Caitlin’s mother wouldn’t have permitted such disorder in her kitchen. Cooking was cathartic for her. This sort of chaos wouldn’t have made sense.

Before we drink, something else strikes me. Caitlin is the kind of person who, like her mother, always makes a toast—to love or life or health or friends. But today our glasses stay silent, like she’s waiting for Kathleen. We spend the next several hours sitting at a breakfast table near the fireplace, telling stories and shedding tears.

It doesn’t seem real. Not to me. Certainly not to her.

About a week later, Caitlin’s stepfather, Michael Peterson—a novelist, newspaper columnist, and one-time Durham mayoral candidate—was indicted by a grand jury and charged with first-degree murder. In 2003, a jury convicted Peterson of the crime, after what had been, to that point, the longest and perhaps most sensational trial in Durham’s history.

Later, issues unrelated to the Peterson case called into question the integrity of a key blood-spatter analyst from the State Bureau of Investigation and gave Peterson an opening. His conviction was vacated and a retrial was granted. A hearing scheduled for Friday will bring this saga to a close, with Peterson pleading guilty to manslaughter but maintaining his innocence.

This is not that story. This is the story of a mother and a daughter, of fading memories, of a legacy Caitlin hopes will never die.

Within two years of her mother’s death, Caitlin found herself at the center of a media circus—her picture on the front page of the newspaper, her image opposite Nancy Grace—as the Peterson trial became a national phenomenon. But through it all—the trial and her stepfather’s murder conviction October 10, 2003, the denied appeals, the successful wrongful-death lawsuit, the order for a retrial just after the ten-year anniversary of her mother’s death —Caitlin never told her story. She never told the world what made Kathleen special.

Her mother was, to most people following the case, simply The Victim.

Last week, over a bottle of wine inside a nearly empty Italian restaurant in the city where she now resides with her husband and their two children (Caitlin has asked the INDY not to publish her married name or where she lives), I learned that, despite Friday’s hearing and all the terrible memories it brings back, Caitlin is as close to peace as she’ll ever be. Today, her mother represents more than the handful of memories Caitlin clings to. Kathleen—the mother, spouse, philanthropist, friend—is a standard she longs to meet. She’s a feeling, an ideal.

“The only thing that I have to say about the trial and all the subsequent fallout is that, if there was any closure to possibly come from all of this, it came after sitting through the entire trial and listening day after day to all the evidence—on both sides,” she told me. “And after the closing arguments, when all was said and done, I felt confident that I knew what happened. I knew what happened to my mom. While there’s no true closure that can ever come for an event like this, for a loss this deep, I was ready to walk away and start moving forward with my life.”

Kathleen Hunt Atwater Peterson was born February 21, 1953, in Greensboro, North Carolina, and grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She graduated first in her class at J.P. McCaskey High School, where, as a student, she was editor of the school magazine, named “Girl of the Year,” and became the first high school student to take college-level Latin classes at Franklin & Marshall College. She moved to Durham to attend Duke University. It’s been reported that, in 1971, she became the first female student accepted into Duke’s engineering school, and she later earned her bachelor of science degree and a master’s in mechanical engineering.

Kathleen once told Caitlin that she saw attending school in Durham as an adventure. Given her academic success and the fact that she met her first husband, Fred Atwater, at Duke, that proved to be true. The couple moved to Maryland, where, in addition to Kathleen climbing the corporate ladder at Baltimore Air-Coil, they had their first and only child. (Kathleen and Fred later divorced; she married Michael Peterson in 1997.)

Being a mother suited Kathleen, Caitlin says. And when the Atwaters moved back to Durham—to a house in Forest Hills on Hermitage Court—a few years later, Kathleen devoted a great deal of energy to doting on her daughter.

Caitlin remembers her fifth or sixth birthday, how Kathleen—despite her long hours at Nortel and her role as a prominent Durham socialite and arts benefactor—went to great lengths to ensure her little girl had the perfect tea party.

“You know how kids nowadays have all these costumes and everyone has the princess outfits? Well, we didn’t have any of that. We had my grandmother’s old clothes from like the nineteen-forties and whatnot,” Caitlin says. “I remember, my mom laid out all these old dresses and then she set up an accessory section displaying bracelets and clip-on earrings, hanging all the necklaces from the ears of the horse, lining up big high-heels. It was like real dress-up, like you would hope kids would be doing when they’re playing in their mom’s closet.”

One by one, as Kathleen looked on, Caitlin and her friends picked out something to wear. To Kathleen, it wasn’t about the party, Caitlin says. It was about the experience. After the girls were dressed, Kathleen made them feel like royalty.

Thirty years later, Caitlin can’t remember what the tea tasted like or what flavor cake her mother made for the occasion. But she can still describe, in detail, the party favors—the custom picture frames Kathleen crafted to ensure the memory lived on.

And today Caitlin, unable to call her mother for tips, prints individual paper invitations for every special occasion she hosts—from her twins’ birthday parties to holiday celebrations. She avoids store-bought conveniences and corner-cutting, hand-making her own version of the baked Brie, cheese straws, and tarts that were staples at the many bashes Kathleen brought to life.

“I remember the day of the [American Dance Festival], the grill would be a bed of chicken. She always made this Dance Festival pasta salad. It’s one of those taste memories I finally figured out and re-created,” Caitlin says. “There is so much, so many memories like that that are [like a fading picture]. So then, the things I’ve been able to cling onto that are those solid memories are so amazing. And when I do these things, it’s like I’m channeling her. It keeps her close.”

Caitlin used to keep a list, several pages of things Kathleen wasn’t able to experience with her daughter. She found that the milestones were easier to get through than the routine.

“Of course, there are the clichés, but I think the big days, like getting married and having kids or buying a new home, the big things in your life, the anticipation of those, of not having my mom there, those weren’t as bad as I thought because I was so dreading it,” she says. “When those moments finally arrive, you’ve already been through so much emotionally, that, yes, it’s still hard, but at least you know why it’s hard.”

But the less significant things—the funny thing that happened at the store, or the skit on Saturday Night Live that made her laugh—are what leave Caitlin at a loss. It’s been so long since she’s experienced the typical day-to-day banter with her mother that she can’t quite make out what she’s missing. That unknown is maddening. So when she watched Love Actually for the first time, she got emotional.

“She would have fucking loved that movie,” Caitlin says. “You know, every day, you wait for the moment when it’s going to hit you. My mom’s not going to be there for this, and this, but thinking about [those big moments] a lot leading up to them, it makes you turn to, ‘OK. What would she do if she were here? What would she have provided?’ And on one level, figuring that out or comforting yourself or finding someone to fill that space is good. But when it comes to the little things, it’s like, I don’t know how she would’ve reacted to this. And you start second-guessing yourself because you don’t remember.”

It’s the constant fear of losing her connection to Kathleen that will forever make Caitlin a victim. “When your memories start to fade some, and they have started to fade, it’s hard,” she says. But it also drives her “to live the way I think I would if she were here with me.”

So she made Halloween costumes for her twin toddlers and took a picture of them standing on the front porch of her home, surrounded by pumpkins.

“You have to see this picture,” she says, pulling an old family photograph from an envelope that belonged to Kathleen. “I haven’t looked at this picture in years, but clearly, subconsciously, I remembered this.” Caitlin, as a little girl, is dressed for trick-or-treating. She’s standing on the front porch of her Durham home, surrounded by pumpkins.

“That’s clearly like, I’m trying to be my mother. This is how I grew up, and I’m trying to give that to my kids,” she says. “It’s crazy sometimes, but there is so much of me channeling her.”

Last week, Caitlin wasn’t sure whether she would attend Friday’s hearing. It’s been years since she spent significant time in Durham, the only home she knew for the first two decades of her life. And while Durham is a very different place than it was during her youth, she still feels the “watchful eye of the town” when she stops through for a meal at Nana’s or to visit her mother’s grave.

“I have a strong connection to [Durham], but I think it’s been helpful for me to remove myself,” she says.

Reliving memories associated with the trial is painful, she says—so much so that she’d rather not speak of them at all, that just being in Durham can be painful. And because so many of her experiences in Durham have been clouded by melodramatic Lifetime movies and salacious news articles, she chases bursts of her mother in other places.

For instance, in spring 2000, Caitlin, Kathleen, and Kathleen’s mother, Veronica, flew to Paris for a dual birthday celebration: Caitlin’s eighteenth and Veronica’s eightieth.

“I cling so tightly to that trip. I remember it so vividly,” she says.

She could tell you about the entrée she ordered at a Parisian restaurant and how Kathleen leaned in before her daughter made her selection and quipped that if she ordered something too expensive, Kathleen would kick her under the table. She remembers how the black, velvet wrap she wore to the opera felt on her shoulders, and the tasting they attended in the Latin Quarter.

When she and her husband, Christopher, lived in London for several years after he graduated from law school, she returned to Paris a half-dozen times and found herself trying to mimic that memory. But Caitlin, always her mother’s daughter, doesn’t hang onto specific purchases or the names of stores and hotels. She found that one of the most poignant moments—one that only unfolded because of Kathleen’s pursuit of experience—is one she could never properly relive.

“It was our last night in Paris, and we got back to the hotel and we realize we hadn’t seen the Sacré -Coeur, this iconic, beautiful church in Montmarte. So we leave my grandmother at the hotel because it’s late and we decide to take the metro,” Caitlin recounts. “We’re riding along, and all of a sudden my mom leans over to me and [whispering] says, ‘I’m going to act like we’re having a very serious conversation and that we’re very focused on each other, and we’re not going to look at anything but each other, because there’s a man coming down the aisle and he doesn’t have any clothes on so we’re just going to stare at each other.’”

Caitlin doesn’t have much to say about actually seeing the landmark, but she goes on and on about the ride on the metro. Caitlin can close her eyes and replay it. She can, if only for a moment, look into her mother’s eyes again.

Nothing that’s happened since the trial can change that. And nothing that might or might not unfold inside a Durham courthouse Friday will either. So Caitlin will continue to channel her mother when she walks into a kitchen and secures her apron. She’ll ask herself what Kathleen would do at those breaking points all parents face. She’ll carry her loss with her on her terms—and strive to remain her mother’s daughter, guided by the principles Kathleen lived by, even as her memories of her mother slip away.

Caitlin displays just one picture of her mother in her home. The image, she says, embodies the way she sees Kathleen more than fifteen years after her death. In the image, Caitlin, perhaps five years old, sits on her mother’s lap at the top of a mountain. They’re looking out over water, their turned faces revealing no discernible details.

But it brings back a feeling: the freedom of the wind and the beauty of their surroundings, a mother wrapping her arms around her daughter. And it’s that warmth—that instinct to live for her family—that defines Kathleen all these years later.

“I’ve tried to be the person I think I would have been if she were here,” Caitlin says. “And hopefully, that’s a part of her legacy I can pass on to my own kids.”

Further information on Michael Peterson pleading guilty, the timeline of the Peterson case, and the SBI misconduct in Michael Peterson’s trial.