Peterson, Michael 

 

CLAIMING PURPLE HEART(S) - June 2004 -- FROM COURT TV WEBSITE - 

  When business executive Kathleen Peterson was found dead at the bottom of a staircase, investigators figured she fell after a night of drinking. But when pathologists concluded Peterson's injuries looked more like a beating, prosecutors pointed the finger at her husband, novelist Michael Peterson, who now faces life in prison.

    Michael Iver Peterson, 59, was born in 1943 and knew from a young age he wanted to be a writer. A military brat who moved from place to place during his childhood, Peterson read Hemingway and fantasized about being a hard-drinking, hard-living writer one day, he told an interviewer in 1996.
    .....Although he is a decorated soldier, Peterson was forced to admit during a failed bid for Durham mayor in 1999 that his Purple Heart citation was the result of a car accident in Japan and not fighting in Vietnam, as he had long claimed.
   

BBC does Peterson murder case
By John Stevenson : The Herald-Sun
jstevenson@heraldsun.com
Mar 9, 2005 : 8:02 pm ET

DURHAM -- When ABC News last summer aired a two-hour documentary about the Michael Peterson murder case, District Attorney Jim Hardin Jr. thought it was too heavily defense-oriented.
"I think that was clearly their intention all along," he said Wednesday. "There was very little attempt to balance it so that the prosecution's perspective was fully portrayed.".....

Peterson was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Prosecutors did not seek the death penalty........

 

=====================================================================================================


http://www.heraldsun.com/durham/4-725644.html.

Peterson lawyers: Friend's death, bisexuality unfair as evidence
April 18, 2006
By MARGARET LILLARD, Associated Press Writer
       The prosecution of writer Michael Peterson was filled with inflammatory, irrelevant evidence and judicial mistakes that prevented him from getting a fair trial on charges of murdering his wife, his lawyer told a state Court of Appeals panel Tuesday.
    The novelist, newspaper columnist and one-time mayoral candidate was convicted 2 1/2 years ago of first-degree murder in the death of Nortel Networks executive Kathleen Peterson. .....
   

========================================

Peterson civil suit settled for $25M
February 1, 2007
 
By John Stevenson, The Herald-Sun
Lawyers have agreed to a $25 million settlement in a civil lawsuit that accused Michael Peterson of killing his wife, according to documents reviewed by The Herald-Sun, but the deal may be meaningless because the once wealthy Durham novelist is serving a life prison sentence and reportedly has little more than an $8 wristwatch to his name.        
 
Weather permitting, the settlement will be officially announced today at the Raleigh law office of Jay Trehy, who represented Peterson's stepdaughter in the case.        
 
The stepdaughter, Caitlin Atwater, had accused Peterson of maliciously and fatally beating her mother, Nortel Networks executive Kathleen Peterson, in December 2001.  .....