There are some fascinating tidbits of information you will NOT see on The Staircase, the 13-episode true crime docu-series currently streaming on Netflix. One of them is the full story of the blowpokes. It relates to the fact that in September 2003 while he was on trial for the first-degree murder of his wife, novelist Michael Peterson called an antiques store in Maine and ordered three blowpokes to be shipped overnight to his home in Durham, North Carolina.
I first read about this purchase in A Perfect Husband, an account of the case by true crime reporter, Aphrodite Jones, and then saw it confirmed on a message board used by some of the thousands of viewers of the TV series. Like many of those viewers, having watched The Staircase I was eager for more information about the crime and the man accused of it.
What’s A Blowpoke?
If you have watched the docu-series, or at least the first eight episodes, you know how significant the blowpoke is in this story. (A blowpoke (see photo) is a long, thin, hollow metal tube and is a cross between bellows and a poker. It’s used to stoke a wood or coal-burning fire by either blowing through it or poking at it.)
It’s what cops and the prosecutors in Durham said Peterson used to beat his wife, Kathleen Peterson to death while Peterson claimed that his wife died as a result of a fall down the stairs.
The prosectors admitted they could not produce the actual murder-weapon blowpoke. The one they showed to the jurors was owned by Kathleen’s sister Candace. She told prosecutors that she gave one just like it as a Christmas gift to Kathleen many years before, and she believed that’s what Peterson had used to beat Kathleen to death.
District Attorney, Jim Hardin told jurors they had not found a blowpoke during their searches of the Peterson home. He said it was “mysteriously” missing when the cops searched Peterson’s house from top to bottom after the murder in December 2001. He showed jurors the blowpoke owned by Candace so that they could see what the implement looked like.
Spoiler Alert: If you are watching, or plan to watch The Staircase, but have not yet gotten to episodes seven and eight, the rest of this blog contains spoilers, and you may prefer to return to it later.
Missing Blowpoke?
Not much more was said about the blowpoke at the trial until about four months after it started, towards the end of September 2003 (almost two years after the murder) when a blowpoke turned up in Peterson’s garage. It was discovered by his son Clayton in a corner of the garage where it was covered in dust and cobwebs with little bugs and insects clinging to its surface. It appeared to have been in that same spot for months and months.
Its discovery was filmed for The Staircase by the French TV crew embedded with Michael Peterson from the day of his indictment. The TV crew also filmed the subsequent delight of the Peterson family at its discovery, and then the discussion by Peterson and his lawyer, David Rudolf as to what to do next.
In the docu-series (and on his website ) Rudolf debates with himself and his assistant attorneys how to deal with this sudden “find.” He states on camera to his investigator, “How the fuck does that get missed?” And, then adds, “It’s not something Michael Pearson bought in the last six months.”
So, Rudolf is seen arranging for a photographer to document the location and condition of the blowpoke before he removes it. He then takes it for testing to ascertain that there is no blood or DNA on the blowpoke which would point to its use by Peterson as the murder weapon. Finally, he produces it in court as the “missing” blowpoke which police failed to find on the Peterson property.
Reasonable Doubt
In his closing argument, Rudolf cites the newly-found blowpoke as the #1 reason for jurors to have reasonable doubt about the prosecution’s case against Peterson. He power points this as “#1: The murder weapon (the blowpoke) is not missing — and it is not the murder weapon.”
The Staircase subsequently shows the family, Rudolf and Peterson waiting for the jury verdict, believing that Peterson will be acquitted. At worst, one of them says, it’ll be a hung jury. As it turned out, they were wrong: If you’ve watched eight episodes, you know the jury found Peterson guilty of first-degree murder.
And, right around now, dear reader, you are probably wondering about the blowpokes I mentioned in the first paragraph of this blog. Remember? Peterson ordered three of them from Maine (although only two were actually shipped to him.)
But wait! Before you jump to the conclusion that one of them is the blowpoke found in the garage, you should know that, according to several sources including a local newspaper, The Herald-Sun, the blowpokes were shipped from Maine on September 29, 2003. That was six days after Rudolf produced the “missing” one in court on September 23.
What’s more, Peterson made no effort to hide the purchase. He used his own name to place the order, paid for them by a credit card in his own name, and had them shipped to his home. In a subsequent interview, he confirmed that he had purchased the blowpokes, but gave no plausible reason for doing so.
So, Why Buy Blowpokes?
DA Jim Hardin told true-crime author Aphrodite Jones that he had spoken to the store owner who shipped the two blowpokes to Peterson, and that he had a copy of the order form in his vault, but he didn’t know why Peterson had bought them. “Maybe he wanted to give them as gifts,” said Hardin. He concluded his interview with Jones by describing Peterson: “I think he’s an evil person, and, at his core, is a psychopath.”
That set me thinking. Gifts for whom? And why? And, why call him a psychopath? Not all murderers are psychopaths. I was intrigued since my new thriller, tentatively titled Book 3 delves into the world of psychopaths (the antagonist in my story is the son of a serial killer and appears to have inherited his father’s psychopath gene.) Of course, in the interests of research, I had to re-watch the docu-series!
Charming Enigma Or Psychopath?
The first time I watched The Staircase, as I wrote last week, I pretty much agreed with reviewers who wrote, for example, that Peterson is a “man who seems so loving and kind” (Vanity Fair ), or as the New York Times wrote “generally affable and chatty,” or as the guardian.com put it: “there’s the broader question of exactly what charming enigma we are dealing with.” I was inclined to think Peterson had been unjustly accused and wrongly convicted of murdering his wife.
But, after “re-winding” and watching the first eight episodes again, I found myself more in agreement with Jim Hardin’s observations. Here’s why:
A Dark Explanation
If you’ve watched episodes 7 and 8, you may have gotten the feeling, as I certainly did upon re-watching them, that Peterson pulled some kind of a fast one with the discovery of the “missing” blowpoke in the garage. According to Hardin, the cops searched the house for a murder weapon three times from top to bottom, and there was no way, according to Hardin, they could have overlooked a blowpoke where it stood pretty much in plain sight.
Moreover, the docu-series does not provide any answers as to who put it away in the garage in the first place? Or when they put the blowpoke there? It appears in some family photos lying by the fireplace. So, how is it that whichever family member removed it, didn’t remember doing so when the blowpoke was such a central issue in the prosecution’s case? (And, why would Kathleen Peterson put it away in garage? It was a gift from her sister, so why hide it?)
In The Staircase, we also see Peterson worried that the discovery will look “staged” and that the jury won’t believe it just turned up. He appears worried that it will look like he is pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes?
Maybe because that’s exactly what he was doing. Assistant district attorney, Freda Black said of him in closing arguments: “he’s a fictional writer, he knows how to create a fictional plot.” She told the jury the blowpoke in court was “just a piece of nothing” meaning presumably that having used the blowpoke to beat his wife to death, he had disposed of it, bought a new one and placed it in the garage after the cops had stopped searching his house.
That was two years before his trial started — plenty of time for it to gather dust and cobwebs. However, when his attorney, Rudolf, bought into its amazing “re-appearance,” and listed it as the #1 reasonable doubt, Peterson must have convinced himself it would be his ticket to an acquittal. He purchased the Maine blowpokes a few days later.
Blowpoke Gifts
Pretty confident that he would walk free, and could not be re-tried for murder, he planned, to send them as gifts. I think Hardin was right about that. My own theory is that he planned to send one each to Hardin, to the assistant prosecutor Freda Black, and/or to Candace, the sister who had pointed the cops to her blowpoke gift as the murder weapon.
Why? How about because the gifts would have been a “Gotcha!” message (See! Look at these blowpokes!! How difficult do you think it was to get a substitute blowpoke and leave it in the garage for two years?) And, if he’s a real psychopath, he would almost certainly want to taunt his accusers with the fact that he’d gotten away with murder.
But he didn’t get away with it, so we’ll probably never really know what his plans were for the blowpokes from Maine.
Photo Credits : Netflix