It is a riddle subsequent events - notably her husband's early release after admitting manslaughter while still asserting his innocence - have done nothing to clear up. How she got there has provided the army of amateur detectives fascinated by unresolved 'true-crime' cases with one of their most abiding conundrums. Mrs Peterson's life ended at the bottom of a blood-spattered staircase one night in December 2001.
The eight-part series stars Colin Firth as Michael, Toni Collette as Kathleen and Juliette Binoche as Sophie Brunet. Their bizarre romance, not to mention the gruesome and unexplained death of businesswoman Kathleen Peterson that preceded it and became an international sensation, is the subject of a forthcoming HBO drama, The Staircase. I couldn't give her what she needed and deserved.'
'We spent three days together and went to Normandy and she said: 'If you can't commit to love with me all the time, let's end it.' It was a blow to both of us for which I feel not guilt but sorrow. 'I realised, no, I can't live in Paris - I don't speak French, I'm too old, I can't afford to live in Paris and my children and grandchildren were in America,' he told his local newspaper. The couple ended their relationship only in 2017, after he visited France. Stairway to hell: The real couple's (pictured) bizarre romance and the gruesome and unexplained death of businesswoman Kathleen Peterson is the subject of a forthcoming HBO drama Peterson even considered moving to Paris and starting a new life with her. Every two or three months, she would fly from France to stay at his house in Durham, North Carolina. When Peterson was released eight years into his sentence to await retrial, he and Brunet became lovers. Soon they were regularly exchanging letters about books and painting and, a year later, she visited him in prison. She asked if she could send Peterson books, and started with France's great novelist Marcel Proust. And, at least on her, the strategy had clearly worked.īrunet, who watched some 600 hours of footage relating to Peterson's case, wrote: 'I saw you, I know you're innocent, it was a great injustice.' She added that the way he'd talked about his wife had moved her. Peterson had given her and her team extraordinary access as he sought to prove his innocence.
Its sender, a Frenchwoman living in Paris, insisted that she knew the best-selling American novelist better than anyone, outside his family - so much so that she was convinced Peterson was innocent.īut Sophie Brunet wasn't one of those weird obsessives who wrote fan mail to convicted serial killers - instead, she was the editor of an acclaimed documentary series, The Staircase, about Peterson's intriguing case. Back in November 2003, Michael Peterson was only a month into a life sentence for murdering his wife when he received a strange but cheering letter in prison.