'Till Death Do Us Part: Love, Marriage, and the Mind of the Killer Spouse (18 page)

8

The Transference Killer

T
RANSFERENCE
is a subject generally reserved to psychologically oriented or therapeutic circles. It is a reenactment of a person’s early life experiences, impulses, and fantasies. The individual replaces a protagonist from his past with a current partner from the present. For example, a wife’s behavior may remind a husband of his irritating or abusive mother. Thus, transference is a misrepresentation of the present. The individual sees what he needs to see, rather than what is there.

In an intimate-partner homicide, the person from the past gets superimposed onto the current spouse. Unless appropriately analyzed, this transference of old feelings onto the spouse is hard to distinguish. The bad “mother” from the past becomes no different from the bad spouse in the moment. The nature of transference is based in unfulfilled emotional needs from childhood. According to some research, there are striking similarities in certain behaviors between the mother/infant interaction and that of romantic lovers. The similarities include close proximity, hugging, kissing, touching, and performing distinctive gestures.

The emotional and physical language of love is learned very early in life. When we fall in love, we draw more or less from our experiences with our early caretakers. The emotional instinct or desire of the person in love is ultimately to become a baby and to be completely indulged with love. But even in the most secure situations, a caretaker can frustrate the baby. There are always obstacles to experiencing love. In the most extreme cases the obstacles result from negligence, abandonment, abuse, loss of love, or symptoms of a parent’s psychopathology. In adulthood, we often choose partners who remind us of our parents. We choose them in part to help re-create our childhood struggles in order to help us resolve the original trauma and move on. In some cases the original trauma is so hateful and damaging that the partner who re-creates it ends up being violent or murderous.

With this in mind, individuals select a partner who fit their idea or model of someone they can relate to in the same way they related to a parent or other family member. They can even distort the love object and see him/her as more like this significant person from the past than he/she really is. If this distortion does not happen naturally, the transference killer’s personality is capable of provoking his romantic partner into the behavior that he seeks. All of these tendencies make it less likely that such personalities will be able to achieve the intimacy and/or “fantasy bond” they are searching for. The anger and rage that comes from this realization can lead certain individuals to commit murder or violence against their partner.

And small differences can sometimes cause great problems. In many couples, one spouse is seen as the potentially good parent. People who can’t bear the thought or idea that good and bad can exist within the same person can feel depressed, anxious, and sometimes murderous. When feelings of humiliation or degradation increase to the point that a person feels worthless or hates himself, resulting suicidal feelings can trigger homicidal actions.

Freud had a basically pessimistic view of love. He said that violence is hardly surprising or exceptional in interpersonal relationships: “The evidence of psycho-analysis shows that almost every emotional relation between two people which lasts for some time—marriage, friendship, the relationships between parents and children—leaves a sediment of feelings of aversion and hostility, which only escapes perception as a result of repression.”

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T
HE
transference killer is unable to repress this hostility, and for
MICHAEL PETERSON
, it was déjà vu all over again.

Peterson, fifty-nine, was a novelist and onetime newspaper columnist who often infuriated local police with his blistering attacks on their competence. But on December 9, 2001, it was Peterson who called police during the early morning hours to report that his wife Kathleen, forty-eight, was bleeding and unconscious. When police arrived at the Petersons’ expansive Durham, North Carolina, home, Kathleen was dead.

Michael claimed his wife had fallen down the stairs and struck her head. Investigators didn’t believe him. They found blood on cabinetry in the kitchen, and the amount of blood pooled around Kathleen’s head seemed like far too much to have come from a simple fall. And it seemed equally unlikely that such a fall could have caused all of Kathleen’s head wounds. The medical examiner also concluded the damage to Kathleen’s neck indicated that someone had tried to strangle her.

Within a week Peterson was arrested and charged with murdering his wife. The reason, police later said, was that Peterson was angered that his wife had racked up over $100,000 in credit card debt, and he wanted to collect on her $1.4 million insurance policy. After Peterson was released on $850,000 bond, investigators received another tantalizing piece of information: In 1985, another woman who knew Peterson had been found dead at the bottom of a stairway—that time in Germany, where Peterson then lived.

The woman, Elizabeth Ratliff, was a next-door neighbor and friend who, like Kathleen, had suffered head wounds. Though local authorities had ruled her death accidental, there were too many similarities for prosecutors to dismiss. And under North Carolina rules of evidence, the prosecutors could use Ratliff’s death as a comparison.

Peterson denied having any part in Ratliff’s death, and pointed to her two daughters, who he subsequently raised as evidence of his love and loyalty to her. As for Kathleen, Peterson claimed his wife had been drinking when she fell down the stairs, hitting her head. He said that she was bleeding but still conscious and that she had tried to get up but slipped on her own blood and fell to the floor, striking her head a second time. His defense appeared preposterous, but friends said the pair had a loving relationship and murder was not something anyone could even consider.

* * * * *

P
ETERSON
grew up in a military family, moving from base to base, country to country. He attended Duke University, studying political science and editing the student newspaper. Writing had always intrigued Peterson, who thought of himself as a successor to Hemingway. After graduating in 1965 he was hired by the U.S. Department of Defense to research and write papers supporting the war in Vietnam. Peterson decided to enlist in the Marines in 1967 and told friends he had been in combat, which led to injuries and a Purple Heart.

Following his discharge four years later, Peterson served as a government consultant. He married his first wife, Patricia, and the couple had two sons. By the mid-1980s they were living in Germany and it was there that, in 1985, their next-door neighbor Elizabeth Ratliff was found dead. Ratliff was a widow and mother of two daughters. She had worked as a schoolteacher for the Department of Defense. The night before she died, Ratliff had dinner with Peterson and his wife, after which Peterson walked Ratliff home. She had several lacerations to the head and her death was ruled the result of a brain hemorrhage.

The Petersons later returned to North Carolina, raising their two sons and Ratliff’s two daughters. Peterson began writing and authored three semi-successful novels, all based on his military experience. The money earned from his books went into the purchase of an 11,000-square-foot home. He also served as a columnist for the local newspaper, the
Durham Herald-Sun.

Peterson was still married when he met Kathleen Atwater. She was ten years younger and, like Peterson, had graduated from Duke, in her case with an engineering degree. Kathleen had become a successful executive earning $140,000 per year. Peterson divorced Patricia and in 1997 married Kathleen. It was the second marriage for Kathleen, who had a daughter. Along with Peterson’s two sons and Ratliff’s two daughters, five children were then living in the Peterson home.

By all accounts Kathleen and Michael Peterson enjoyed each other, spending weekends at their home entertaining friends, often with plenty of alcohol. Kathleen continued to work while Peterson wrote. He also decided to run for mayor of Durham in 1999, but during the campaign he was forced to make an embarrassing public admission: the Purple Heart he received in Vietnam was not awarded for wounds received in combat, but from an auto accident in Japan.

Peterson lost the election and returned to his writing. Perhaps his greatest story was the one he told on the night of Kathleen’s death when the police arrived at his home. Peterson, wearing shorts, was covered in blood. The medical examiner later concluded that Kathleen died from “blunt force trauma” to the head and that her injuries were inconsistent with a fall. Peterson was subsequently arrested. After investigators learned of Ratliff’s death some 16 years earlier, they had her body exhumed from her grave in Texas and brought to North Carolina, where pathologists concluded that she had not died from natural causes, but like Kathleen Peterson, from “blunt force trauma,” and from assault from seven separate blows to the head. In addition, as stated in the original police report, a witness had seen Peterson “running” from Ratliff’s home that night in 1985.

Following a lengthy trial in October 2002, Michael Peterson was found guilty of murdering Kathleen and sentenced to life in prison. He was later charged with the 1985 murder of Elizabeth Ratliff and is awaiting trial.

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O
NE
of the reasons this case is so fascinating is the repeat performance of the killing that occurred sixteen years before. After an evening with Peterson and his first wife, Elizabeth Ratliff had also ended up dead at the bottom of her staircase. Ratliff and Kathleen Peterson would never have a chance to meet, but their deaths were not the only thing they had in common: they eerily resembled each other. The two could have been twins separated at birth. Perhaps Michael fell so quickly for Kathleen because she reminded him of Elizabeth Ratliff. For Peterson, marrying Kathleen was a second chance to make things right, and his motives were born from transference, where one person gets substituted for another and is experienced in the same way.

The ideas we have about ourselves and those around us are influenced by our original caregivers and early life experiences. If we are routinely criticized or put down, we can develop a damaged sense of ourselves and self-worth. When we are young, we see our parents as all-powerful and the center of our universe. If they view us as bad we automatically assume they are correct. We internalize their negative feelings and ideas about us, making these feelings part of our own self-view.

When a child suffers from a harmful childhood experience, even if it is not remembered consciously, it can create emotional scars and inhibit that child’s ability to develop close and rewarding relationships with the people in his or her adult life.

The attachment styles that we develop in childhood stay with us for a lifetime. They influence everything from our feelings of security to our ability to develop healthy intimacy with others. If we develop a healthy attachment style we have a better chance for trusting, rewarding, and loving relationships with others. If our primary childhood caregivers were unavailable, critical, indifferent, and unsupportive, we may be unable to later rely on others for love.

We are biologically designed to seek and maintain attachment to others in part to learn the lessons of love and trust. When people enter into a marital relationship, both will bring with them their past unresolved conflicts, expectations, suspicions, and upsets. There is a strong propensity to want to re-create neglectful, abusive, and hurtful childhood relationships with our adult partners in an attempt to resolve old psychic wounds. A trigger in the current relationship can unleash the old feelings and reactions, in turn creating confusion between what is an old hurt and what is a new one.

It’s probable that Peterson replayed something with these two women that originated with one or both of his parents. Who might these two women have brought to his mind? Michael Peterson’s sister was one of the most vocal family members at his trial to state her feeling about her brother’s guilt. It is very possible that she knew something about her brother that the two victims never did.

It appears that Michael developed an attraction toward the first woman, Elizabeth Ratliff. It’s possible that he may have killed her accidentally, felt remorseful, and in an attempt to undo his wrong, devoted himself to raising her two children.

Why would he commit the two murders in the same way? One answer could be because he got away with it the first time, he thought he could get away with it the second time. He might have been compelled by earlier experience to repeat this pattern of homicidal violence. He could have killed Elizabeth accidentally in a moment of rage and by the time he was married for the second time, his rage may have become habitual. It is also possible that Kathleen became enraged with her husband on that fateful night and confronted him about the bills, his lack of professional success, and about an alleged online gay dalliance. She could have been drinking, paranoid, and asking him multiple questions that drove him crazy. He felt assaulted by Kathleen and her intense desire to meet her needs, which were conflicting with his needs, which made him feel threatened and out of control. In his mind, Kathleen was just like all of the other women in his life who had failed him. She was like Elizabeth. They all became one person linked and merged together. By the time he regained control of himself, Kathleen was dead. It was just like what happened with Elizabeth all over again.

* * * * *

T
HE
convincing 911 call could be attributed to Michael’s novelistic skills. Fiction writers commonly imagine feelings one might have in a particular situation, including murder. He might have asked himself, How would a hysterical husband act after finding out his beloved wife was dead?

The panic Michael Peterson felt could be attributed to what the police were likely to dig up about his past and how suspect his background would make him look. Certainly he would not want the police to find out about the previous dead woman in his life, his mounting debt, and the gay escort he was having a dalliance with prior to his wife’s death. Maybe Peterson viewed the police department as one big floating superego, the part of the personality that punishes an individual for perceived and real wrongdoings. He may have attacked the police in his writing in an attempt to justify his behavior, or it could have been his guilty conscious trying to get caught. After all, if he made the police angry, would they not grow more anxious to prove his guilt?