TORN OVER MA’S DEATH
‘Staircase’ eyes family tension with dad as focus of slay probe
How Kathleen Peterson died depends on who you ask. Maybe she slipped, tipsy, down the stairs, hit her head on the wall and bled out. Maybe her husband, Michael, beat her to death because she found out he was bisexual. Maybe an owl killed her.
Michael Peterson has told his story, to a documentary team — Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s miniseries aired in 2004 — to a jury, in his own memoir. Now, “The Staircase” will take a crack at it.
The HBO Max true crime series, which premiered Thursday, sets itself in three timelines: the first, the months leading up to the death of Kathleen (Toni Collette), when she and Michael (Colin Firth) lived a mostly happy life, freckled by normal fights about money and their kids; the second, on the night of Dec. 9, 2001, when the police are called to their Durham, N.C., home and found Kathleen’s mangled, bloody body at the bottom of the staircase; and the third, in 2017, as a nervous Michael prepares to face his second trial.
Showrunner Antonio Campos, who first watched the original documentary in 2008, started by trying to solve the case, reading books on blood spatter and doing his own investigative work. When he finally admitted that wouldn’t work, he realized he could do something even more important: tell the whole story.
“The film crew was telling their own version of events while watching the defense tell their version of events and the prosecution tell their version of events,” Campos told the Daily News. “Everyone was coming up with their own version of events. And somewhere in there was the truth, but nobody was really looking for that; they were just looking for their own story.”
Whether or not Michael killed Kathleen, her death upended not just his life but that of their entire family — sons Clayton (Dane deHaan) and Todd (Patrick Schwarzenegger) from Michael’s first marriage, daughter Caitlin (Olivia DeJonge) from Kathleen’s first marriage and two adopted daughters Margaret (Sophie Turner) and Martha (Odessa Young) — forcing them to choose a parent in the most extreme circumstances.
“Everyone went through it together,” Dane DeHaan, who plays Michael’s blacksheep son Clayton, told The News. “When a family goes through a complicated scenario, it gets complicated. Generally speaking, I think the siblings went through all of this together from beginning to end.”
For a while, that’s true. But as the murder investigation goes on, the siblings begin to fracture. Between the high stakes of the trial, the still-omnipresent grief over
Kathleen’s death and the documentary film crew that Michael invited into their home, the pressure boils over.
But Michael’s sons refused to give up on their father.
“There’s the father-son dynamic of me always trying to impress my father and make him proud of me and staying by his side through thick and thin is a large part of why I’m doing it: to keep his faith in me and his attention toward me,” Schwarzenegger told The News.
“It’s always a little dynamic between [the brothers] of who’s going to be our father’s favorite. There’s a jealousy component and it definitely affects our relationship of who’s going to be by our father’s side.”
The murder trial made national headlines. It had everything: a blood-soaked victim, a second suspicious death, sordid whispers about Michael’s sexuality and whether his rumored gay lifestyle had been the final straw for Kathleen.
Michael shields his daughters from that speculation, from conversations about whether he was gay, bisexual or none of the above. But Clayton and Todd are mired in it. They don’t get to avoid the conversations no one wants to have with their dad, because if they want him to love them, they have to keep him out of prison.
Kathleen’s death spiderwebbed out to more victims. The ripple effects tore apart the Peterson family. And Michael invited the video cameras into his home to film it all.
Where de Lestrade’s documentary stayed away from the family, “The Staircase” mires itself in the Petersons, in Clayton’s legal problems and Caitlin’s betrayal, in children desperate to please their father, no matter what they’re forced to sacrifice, in a marriage split open for the world to see.
“So much of [Michael’s] private life was used against him, so much of that aspect of his sexuality, the idea that a man and a woman could be together but still have a sexuality that didn’t fit the classic mold of a marriage. At the time, it was very hard for people to believe that or understand that. I think we know now that those kind of dynamics are very possible and we can talk about them more openly, but at that time, particularly in Durham, N.C., that was not necessarily the case,” Campos told The News.
“This happened right after 9/11. Kathleen was found dead right after 9/11. The French filmmakers came to Durham right after 9/11, when freedom fries were a thing. This was a world where people all of a sudden became even more scared of the outside, even more afraid of what they didn’t know.”