re: Michael Peterson vs Scott Peterson - did both of them actually do it?

Michael Peterson absolutely killed his wife. This has been covered a lot in prior threads, but if you are only using the Staircase to come to a conclusion than you are severely misinformed. Calling the Staircase a documentary is generous. I remember watching it and thinking that there had to be more to the story. I mean, the prosecution presented evidence and testimony for months, but that got maybe 3 minutes of airtime, so I looked into it myself. They left out huge pieces of evidence that favored guilt including the fact that the police found bloody footprints that matched the defendants shoes that lead from the body to the laundry room. They could only see them with luminol because someone had wiped them up. Peterson was shoeless when they arrived, and the shoes that he had taken off were in the laundry room. They the soles were freshly cleaned, but still had spots of blood on the top of them.

They also found that he had recently poured bottles of wine down the sink in an effort to say that she drank them and was drunk, contrary to her BAC.

They also left out info on the blowpoke found by the Peterson family much later. They did an investigation into it found out michael Peterson had called around to places in the northeast looking for an antique blowpoke. In fact, a month before it was “found” by the son in the garage, Peterson’s credit card had a payment from an antique shop in like Vermont where someone using his credit card bought an antique blowpoke.

And that is just few of many facts that were egregiously absent from the “documentary,” but a guy being clearly guilty doesn’t make for a good story. It has to seem like a tossup or at least a miscarriage of justice to be compelling. The director had that in the prior documentary he did and tried to manufacture it with Peterson. It also probably didn’t help the film makers objectivity that one of the producers started dating Peterson right after filming.

There was definitely bad science going on and some awful/immoral police work done by that one investigator, but Peterson absolutely killed his wife.