GUILTY NC - Kathleen Peterson, 48, found dead in her Durham home, 9 Dec 2001

  • #41
Hey! I missed the stuff I'm hearing from you guys about the condom wrapper! Somebody pleeeeaase fill me in! (I'm in withdrawal since the jury got their hurric-vacation!)

Condom? Condom wrapper? Huh?
 
  • #42
  • #43
  • #44
SILVER DOLLAR:

THAT IS FANTASTIC! THANKS!
 
  • #45
Just knowing MP was in Viet Nam as a high ranking officer, I found this site interesting about the hyoid fracture. VEERRY INFORMATIVE!

http://bjj.org/articles/971008-revive/

Your thoughts?
 
  • #46
Thanks for the info!
 
  • #47
SILVER DOLLAR:

My thyroid cartilage is now hurting!!!!! Thanks for the info.
You know he claimed to have been awarded a Purple Heart but it was un-covered that he had lied.
 
  • #48
Bombshell defense day, to use the court tv anchor's words. The alleged murder weapon, a "blowpoke", which has been missing, suddenly appeared mysteriously in court today. I was worried about the prosecution's adherence to that as the murder weapon, because they have kept too tight to something they couldn't find, but now I'm really worried. The item was supposedly found in the Peterson home in the "garage/basement" area and was introduced without foundation by the defense. The prosecution must have been shell-shocked, because they did not object. I am very skeptical about the item's admittance into evidence, as well as who found it, since Peterson and his family/friends reside in the home. I am really getting worried that the defendant is going to walk. It looks like my attorney friends from Raleigh might have been right... LE and DA's offices in the area are notorious for being bumbling idiots. I wouldn't go that far, but it looks like they might have at least fumbled. I like the prosecution team, and it looks like the crime scene preservation is certainly better than some, but to overlook the supposed murder weapon in the home and to count on it as the "smoking gun" is not very savvy in my opinion.

This case just gets more and more suspense filled for me. I do await the prosecution rebuttal and the closing arguments. Maybe the prosecution will ignite some of its passion and drive their main points home. Sometimes cases get so lost in the periferal stuff and lose the main objective.
 
  • #49
If the police are so incompetent that they couldn't find this article in the defendant's garage and the jury doesn't buy their case, then its too bad for the prosecution. Just because some of all of us might think this guy's guilty, if the state cannot prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, then he deserves to walk.
 
  • #50
The police couldn't find it in the defendant's garage because it wasn't there when they looked, in my opinion.

And I don't care if a prosecution is made up of circus clowns & potato-headed freaks; a two-time murdering, lying sack of garbage never deserves to walk.
 
  • #51
Originally posted by boody
The police couldn't find it in the defendant's garage because it wasn't there when they looked, in my opinion.

And I don't care if a prosecution is made up of circus clowns & potato-headed freaks; a two-time murdering, lying sack of garbage never deserves to walk.


If that's true, then the police need to do a better job. If the guy is guilty, I hope the jury (whose there to hear all of the evidence) finds him guilty. I just think the state needs to PROVE it, that's all. Hopefully, they'll prove the crap out of it and he won't tie the state up in appeals until hell freezes over and then get a new trial!
 
  • #52
Originally posted by Jeana (DP)
If that's true, then the police need to do a better job. If the guy is guilty, I hope the jury (whose there to hear all of the evidence) finds him guilty. I just think the state needs to PROVE it, that's all. Hopefully, they'll prove the crap out of it and he won't tie the state up in appeals until hell freezes over and then get a new trial!

Jeana... The prosecution's whole case was pure fantasyland. They never had a murder weapon in either of the two alleged murders, nor could they establish a clear, much less a compelling, motive in either of these supposed murders. Even before today's blowpoke surprise, David Rudolf had moved so far into the reasonable doubt zone that the D.A. couldn't find him if he used the Hubble telescope.

The fact that the prosecution brought the blowpoke into the trial as the murder wearpon without having LE first certify that it was not in the house or on the grounds proves their massive incompetence, which is exactly what Michael Peterson wrote about in his press articles. The irony is that the trial proves he was 100% correct, and he will end up writing a best seller as a result, which centers on the stunning incompetency by LE and the prosecution in his own murder trial.

I watched the whole trial, and in my estimation, the D.A, Hardin, and Freda Black's incompetency in this trial surpassed even the incompetency record established by Marsha Clark and Chris Darden in the OJ trial.

Simply put, this case should never have been brought to trial. It was a massive abuse of power by the prosecutor's office to have done so. Fittingly, the prosecutors will leave the courtroom with their heads down, their tails between their legs and impaled on the hard sword of justice.
 
  • #53
Hey Wudge!

You write so well but I disagree!!! I am completely on the prosecution's side in this case.

And also believe old crafty MP had hidden it very carefully somewhere.....perhaps up in the chimney (there are a lot of chimneys).......
 
  • #54
I agree Tthoman! Wudge writes so articulately, but I disagree in some respects as well. I do believe that the LE and prosecution have dropped the ball. I do not believe that Michael Peterson is innocent. When I first started watching and talking about this trial, I really thought it was a stretch that a case was brought to court at all. After settling in and hearing the evidence, I drastically changed my mind. I do believe that he is guilty. There are too many cooincidences, and there aren't that many in the natural world. I am afraid that Rudolf has one upped the prosecution team one too many times. They were no match for Rudolf's excellence (I hate him so much I love him). Wudge is probably right, much to my dismay, that Peterson will get ultimate poetic justice when he writes a bestseller about getting away with murder. There is new news about Candace (Kathleen's sister) carrying a long skinny box into the court. I wish that the trial had stuck to the facts and not veered into crazy land with all this blow poke business. Oh well, here we go!
 
  • #55
SARIEBELL:

Maybe the fp poker was the logical conclusion as to his weapon after Mr. Hardin had met with Candace originally. It makes sense.

I haven't watched it this week...relying on the News/Observer.

Remember when the Irish nanny said in a private interview that he had told her long ago she would be reading about herself in one of his books? He and Rudolf are so full of themselves that in the end, he will outsmart himself.
 
  • #56
I hope you are right. I have had a chance to watch and keep up with websleuths today, because it is my laid back day of teaching and I have all my extra work done! I am more and more interested in this case. It really could go either way, but "reasonable doubt" is easier to get than a conviction for murder!

Candace seems like her heart is definitely in the right place, but she is overpowering. She is a bit too much! I guess she may have overly influenced the prosecution to think of the blow poke as the murder weapon. Much like the Courttv anchors, I had never heard of such an instrument until this case came onto the scene.

I'll update if I hear anything terribly interesting. I was interested in the testimony of the evidence custodian who reiterated the list of items which came in. The "used" condom and the wrapper were mentioned. I think the prosecution should have really made more of those items, especially given the hustler guy that went on the stand. If Kathleen caught MP in bed with a homosexual-college-student-hustler, she would probably have flown off the handle! Especially since her money was being spent to pay for it!!!LOL!
I'd like to see him explain that scene away with "just doing research for my new book..."
 
  • #57
Originally posted by sariebell
I agree Tthoman! Wudge writes so articulately, but I disagree in some respects as well. I do believe that the LE and prosecution have dropped the ball. I do not believe that Michael Peterson is innocent. When I first started watching and talking about this trial, I really thought it was a stretch that a case was brought to court at all. After settling in and hearing the evidence, I drastically changed my mind. I do believe that he is guilty. There are too many cooincidences, and there aren't that many in the natural world. I am afraid that Rudolf has one upped the prosecution team one too many times. They were no match for Rudolf's excellence (I hate him so much I love him). Wudge is probably right, much to my dismay, that Peterson will get ultimate poetic justice when he writes a bestseller about getting away with murder. There is new news about Candace (Kathleen's sister) carrying a long skinny box into the court. I wish that the trial had stuck to the facts and not veered into crazy land with all this blow poke business. Oh well, here we go!

Michael Peterson may not be innocent, and I don't know whether Michael Peterson killed his wife or not, nor does anyone else. Jurors are not asked to find the truth, nor are they asked to render a verdict based on what they feel, think or believe; they are asked to guage the existence of reasonable doubt based on the evidence made available to them.

I approach all cases and trials from the perspective of reasonable doubt. And I do it based on the evidence available at any point in time. This keeps me in perfect tune to what the end deliverable will be, a Guilty/Not Guilty verdict based on the weight of the evidence measured against the reasonable doubt hurdle.

I will leave the determination of the truth to a power far greater than I. I simply wait for the weight of the evidence to take me up and over the reasonable doubt hurdle, and it never came close in this trial. My position throughout the course of this trial was Not Guilty -- Not Guilty does not mean innocent -- and with most every passing day, a Not Guilty verdict was becoming more assurred as I watched he the needle on my evidentiary weighing scales continually drift deeper into the Not Guilty zone.

In this trial, we heard of two alleged murders. One death, Ms. Ratlif's, did not take place in Michael Peterson's home, nor was the woman his wife, nor did she die of bleed out, but she had often complained of the very worst of headache's in the weeks before she was found dead, which the original medical examiner determined occurred from a cerebral hemorrhage.

The other dead woman, Kathleen Peterson, was his wife and she died of bleed out -- as we all are well aware -- and she had also complained of severe headaches, and it is also very significant that she suffered a half hour of blindness in the days just before her death. Additionally, she had taken valium and been heavily drinking the night that she died -- alcohol is a well known blood thinner/lubricant, it acts like aspirin, and will it also facilitate bleed out .

In neither case was any alleged murder weapon found, and in neither case was a clear, much less a compelling, motive established.

I won't go into what reasonable doubt entails here, but it is not comprised of rank speculation and conjecture, which is what the prosecution's case represented..

The evidence simply was not there, and, for the most part, each prosecution witness did far more for the defense than they did for the prosecution. The prosecution never came close to establishing a clear and convincing preponderance of the evidence basket that would enable a jury to breach the reasonable doubt hurdle.

To me, this case represented a major abuse of prosecutorial power, such things do happen, sadly. It simply should never have been brought to the inside of a courtroom, a provable case was not there, period.

I never have an axe to grind with anyone who is charged with a crime, I just guage the evidence that we are aware of. In the Kobe case, things look very bad for him, indeed. Yet, before the alleged rape incident occurred, I liked him a lot and thought he well represented himself to be one of the best models the NBA had to offer to the public. I will wait for the evidence to be tested during a ttrial, but as things stand now Kobe will be fortunate if he walks away with a Not Guilty verdict. In the Laci Peterson case, I think Scott is a louse, cad, liar, and adulterer, but there is no citable hard evidence against him, so my reasonable doubt needle reads Not Guilty at this time.

These cases represent how I have always operated; I am evidence oriented, and I weigh each evidentiary item differently as well. If I classified and weighed all the evidence the same, I would have voted Not Guilty for David Westerfield. However, I had him Guilty, because the DNA of the blood evidence -- it ranked much higher on the evidentiary totem pole -- trumped the scientific testimony of the four entomologists -- including the prosecution's own "expert" entomologist -- who were in David Westerfield's camp.

That's the way I operate; it's just the way things are with me.
 
  • #58
Originally posted by tthoman
Hey Wudge!

You write so well but I disagree!!! I am completely on the prosecution's side in this case.

And also believe old crafty MP had hidden it very carefully somewhere.....perhaps up in the chimney (there are a lot of chimneys).......

tthoman.... Thank you for the compliment, it most certainly beats the mortar shells that I continually duck in most forums. lol

If you follow this case closely, you may enjoy the site below, which has some nice links and commentary to the case under the heading of: "Stranger Than Fiction", the Michael Peterson murder trial.

Thank you once again and my best regards.

http://www.vanceholmes.com/court/index.html
 
  • #59
Wudge, thank you for your interpretation of the trial. Unfortunately, I haven't seen any of it, but the snippets I've read on Court TV and the like make me think you may be onto something. I cannot fathom how they're going to get out of the murder weapon theory now.
 
  • #60
HEY ALL:

Saw a tiny bit today....the expert witness for the prosecution was EXCELLENT.........

For Rudolf to have just discovered the blow poke introduced yesterday (over the weeknend supposedly in Peterson's garage) is tommyrot....he is grandstanding. Also, the police went over the house, garage, and grounds with a fine tooth comb. Rudolf is trying to pretend he's having a 'Perry Mason' moment, I think.

WUDGE: Thanks for the link!!!!! Appreciate it!
 

Members online

Online statistics

Members online
69
Guests online
2,374
Total visitors
2,443

Forum statistics

Threads
632,749
Messages
18,631,183
Members
243,277
Latest member
Xotic
Back
Top