Chapter 167 Section 16

The 911 call is over. "This, ladies and gentlemen, is the voice of Mike Peterson when he found Catherine lying at the bottom of the stairs. Now, I ask you to join me, back before that terrible night, back to that terrible Before the call." David Rudolph said that in 1988, just after Catherine officially separated from her ex-husband, Mike Peterson fell in love desperately.At that time, Catherine was not a senior executive with a six-figure annual salary in Northern Telecom, but a trainee engineer who had been in the company for less than a year and only earned $3,000 a month. So clearly it wasn't her money that drew Mike to Catherine, not at all.What connects Mike and Catherine is an admirable and sincere love that can only be experienced by the lucky few in this world.They are soul mates, they are loving couples whose relationship and happiness have nothing to do with worldly things.They used to live in love with each other in a small house for several years, until Mike Peterson received the manuscript fee for "Time of War", and then moved into the big house at 1810 Side Street.

To support his argument, David read a 1999 essay by Kaitlyn Alvart: I remember that in the year after my father left, I often sat alone on the top of the stairs leaning on the railing, listening to my mother sobbing night after night.It was Mike who wiped away her tears, regained her lost courage and confidence, and made her regain her true love.In the back of my mind, I even felt that I owed Mike from the very beginning.It was he who found happiness for his mother. David Rudolph said that the day before Catherine's death, the couple went to buy a Christmas tree and Christmas gifts for the children and went to a holiday party together.On the night of Catherine's accident, they celebrated Mike's possible Hollywood contract together. At 9:30, Mike's son Ted and his girlfriend saw Mike and Catherine happily drinking and watching movies together. There was nothing abnormal between the couple.Similarly, at 11:08, when Catherine's Canadian colleague Helen Puslin called, she could hear Mike's voice in the background, and she did not detect any abnormalities between the Petersons, such as Bickering, fighting, or Catherine speaking nervously, or telling Helen she has to hang up, etc.

Then, in the middle of the night, the couple sat together by the pool for a while.It was their habit before bedtime, Mike to smoke his pipe and Catherine to have a few cigarettes. Between 1:45 and 2, before Catherine came in, she told Mike she was going upstairs to sleep, saying she didn't want to be dazed during the morning conference call. That was the last time Mike Peterson saw his wife alive. David said, yes, Catherine's blood alcohol content was only 007, which was 3 points lower than the legal limit for alcoholism.However, Catherine also found Velumu, a remedy for headaches and dizziness, in her body.Catherine's friends will testify to the court that for weeks Catherine said she had headaches and dizziness.Medical experts hired by the defense will prove to the court that mixing alcohol and Verumu "is not a good thing ... the possible effect is that one makes the other more intoxicating".

And that night, Catherine "in flip-flops, went up a narrow, steep, poorly lit staircase with bare, hard oak planks on top Nothing was laid." "The police in Durham have every reason to think the worst about Mike Peterson," Davy said. "The reason, plainly, is that Mr. .” Mike Peterson—for better or for worse—was an outspoken man who published 20 to 30 articles critical of the police in his newspaper column. David Rudolph selectively read a few of them to the jurors, and then said that with such prejudices and preconceived ideas, the investigators, in the process of solving the case, always and everywhere They only deliberately look for evidence to support their views, while deliberately ignoring other facts.Or explain the same facts in favor of their point of view.For example, the reason why the police initially suspected Mike Peterson of murder was simply because he had blood on his body. "For God's sake, he once hugged his dead wife. How could there be no blood on his body?"

Another point that aroused police suspicion was that by the time emergency personnel arrived, the blood on Catherine's side had already begun to dry, so they decided that Mike Peterson's 911 call that his wife was "still breathing" was a lie.However, "Have you ever considered that Catherine did not necessarily die immediately after falling down the stairs. She could have been lying there, bleeding continuously, but her heart was still beating. Or, the first blood flow It's starting to dry out, but Catherine's still breathing." In fact, the red nerve cells that the police's own experts found in Katherine's brain tissue proved exactly this, proving that Katherine had experienced a slow, painful death process.But ironically, this discovery also became the basis for the police to arrest Mike Peterson-because Catherine did not die immediately, Mike Peterson "wouldn't save him".However, "did it ever occur to you that, according to Mike Peterson himself, he was still outside for nearly an hour after Catherine entered the house?"

As for the most critical evidence of the police's murder - the wounds on the deceased's head, David Rudolph believes that when Catherine fell down the stairs, her head hit the edge of the ladder more than once, "like a pumpkin rolling It cracked like it came down."This also explains why there is so much blood in the stairwell. The defendant's lawyer said that Catherine's brain tissue had no internal injuries such as bruises or contusions, no swelling, no congestion, and no fractures in the skull, which in itself proved his client's innocence. "I mean, can you imagine someone punching another person in the head, trying to beat that person to death, but with the victim's skull intact and no damage to the brain tissue?"