I'm Brett and I'm Alice and we are the prosecutors.

Today on the prosecutors did Michael Peterson kill his wife and if not who else could it be we get to the bottom of the staircase.

Hello everybody and welcome to the prosecutors. I'm Brett and I'm joined as always with my lovely co-host Alice.

How are you doing today? Doing well, doing well. Happy to be back with you again today to talk about the Michael Peterson case.

I'm so excited. Maybe because I've been binge watching the staircase on Netflix but this is just a fascinating case factually and from like the trial perspective.

So I'm so excited for us to get to talk about this.

Now Alice had not seen the staircase so I forced her to watch it basically all in a few days so she's very well steeped in that documentary by us though it may be we'll have to see how that affects Alice's view of this case and we're going to be talking about this one for a while this is definitely going to be a multi-parter we're going to use this case to talk about a lot of different legal topics evidentiary rules.

The role of the jury how prosecutors and defense attorneys approach opening and closing argument. I mean there is so much you can dive into in this case beyond the facts and I know most of you have probably heard this story before and are familiar with this case so I hope that we can bring something different with that that doesn't mean all of you know this case and that's one reason that we started today show with the 911 call I wanted folks who don't know this case.

To hear that call without any preconceived notions and really sort of evaluate that from you know position of sort of tabular rassa right without us biasing you in any way and I think it was interesting Alice and we'll get to this once we get to the trial that the defense essentially started with that 911 call and ended with that 911 call and.

We get sort of to that I'll be interested to know what you think about that whether you think that was a good idea or a bad idea can I just say one thing about how excited I am about this case so I love I think I'm not alone I love Hamilton the musical and I actually put on hold watching Hamilton the musical stream on Disney plus to watch all of the episodes of this year case I know that might not mean anything to you Brett but I think I'm not going to be able to do that.

I think it will mean a lot to a lot of people out there and they'll understand just how great this case is.

These are the sacrifices that Alice makes for the audience in the podcast now I love Hamilton so I don't know why you're throwing shade my way like I don't like Hamilton I do like it.

I didn't say you didn't like it it was just a it was it was like tearing myself away from a true love so I'm just saying this this is another true love.

I don't know why you couldn't just watch it in one sitting.

Okay, no people say we talk too much about our kids but do you try to watch a three hour movie with two kids it's impossible.

Well, yeah, you put them to bed. This is like a you know 815 to 1130 thing or something.

If only you probably have the energy to stay up.

Anyway, so all these these people who complain about us babbling too long at the beginning you're not going to like any of that but that's fine because I don't care it's our podcast.

So anyway, turning to the case.

So we're going to take you all the way back to 2001 and it's the early morning hours of December 9th and there's a desperate 911 call the call that you just heard.

He's made to the Durham police a woman has fallen down the stairs in a seriously injured her desperate husband wants someone anyone to come to help her to save her life.

He's so flustered so frustrated with the 911 operator that he actually ends up hanging up on the operator but then his time is passing and help is still not arriving.

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