The Staircase’s Margie Ratliff, whose family nightmare became a TV sensation in the 2004 series, talks about a new film which looks at the ethics of ‘docu-tainment’
Some lives take on an uncontrollable life of their own. One of those belongs to Margie Ratliff, whose world changed the night before her 20th birthday when the woman she knew as her mother was discovered dead at the bottom of a steep staircase in the family home in Raleigh, North Carolina. The horrific events of that night in 2001 not only resulted in one of the most scrutinised court cases in American legal history, they also launched a new kind of global entertainment: the serial true-life crime documentary, the did-he-do-it?
Michael Peterson, a novelist and Vietnam war veteran and Ratliff’s adoptive father, was charged with the first-degree murder of his second wife, Kathleen. He protested his innocence, claiming Kathleen had fallen down the stairs at the end of an evening spent drinking by the pool. In order, he said, to make the legal process transparent, he invited a film crew from France, led by director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, into the family home to record every detail of his preparation for trial. The film crew had full access to family breakfast tables and lawyers’ briefings and court rooms and prison cells. The defendant and his lawyer, David Rudolf, became stars of the show. Meanwhile, Michael Peterson’s devoted children – Ratliff and her sister Martha and their two adoptive brothers – had to do all of their grieving and a lot of their fast-forward coming of age in front of a camera.
