People in this chapter · Michael Iver Peterson

Durham attorney Larry Pollard, a former neighbor, proposed that an owl might have struck Kathleen outdoors and that she came inside injured before collapsing or falling in the stairwell. He drew attention to the shape of certain scalp wounds and an SBI laboratory reference to a microscopic feather. In 2017, defense attorney David Rudolf asked to have feather material examined by Carla Dove, a forensic ornithologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Reporting on the motion described a defense account that drew on blood drops outside, hair pulled out at the roots, and feather fragments and twigs. The motion establishes what counsel asked a court to permit and why. It supplies no laboratory conclusion by itself. WRAL, Pollard’s proposal and WRAL, 2017 testing request.

See a barred owl in flight

Wildlife reference photograph: Virginia State Parks, barred owl in flight, CC BY 2.0. Barred owls are native to North Carolina woodlands.

The hypothesis raises separate questions about wound shape, trace transfer, timing, and the sequence of events. A species identification, if established, would answer where feather material came from. An investigator would still need evidence connecting it to an attack at the time of Kathleen’s injuries. The injuries and blood documented at the stairs are observations. An encounter outdoors and a subsequent fall are proposed steps in a reconstruction. Neither appellate opinion adopted the owl hypothesis as a factual finding. The public sources used here provide no verified eyewitness account of such a strike. The hypothesis belongs in the case’s history because of the evidence cited and the testing requested, with its uncertainty intact. WRAL’s account of the motion.

The legal case ended on February 24, 2017, when Hudson accepted Michael Peterson’s Alford plea to voluntary manslaughter. The procedure takes its name from a 1970 U.S. Supreme Court case from North Carolina. A defendant can enter a guilty plea while maintaining innocence when the choice is voluntary and intelligent and the record supports accepting it. Hudson credited Peterson with time already served, and he faced no additional imprisonment from the judgment. At the hearing, Kathleen’s sister Candace Zamperini sharply challenged Peterson’s account. Her remarks made clear how differently the legal disposition could be experienced by someone who had lost a sister. North Carolina v. Alford, 400 U.S. 25 and Associated Press, plea hearing.

The first-degree murder verdict, the order vacating it, and the voluntary manslaughter judgment each have a date and a different legal effect. Set beside them are the accounts of the people who examined Kathleen or the scene, the theories of how she was injured, and the later questions about the strength of particular evidence. Keeping those records separate allows the reader to follow the case without giving a theory, a verdict, or a plea more explanatory weight than it can bear.