In mid-April, Investigator Art Holland took the first airplane flight of his life. He flew to Texas with another investigator and a forensic technician to supervise the exhumation of Elizabeth Ratliff.
The gravesite, undisturbed since 1985, was sprouting wild flowers. Taylor Brothers Funeral Home began the morbid task at 8 A.M. on Monday, April 14, at the Cedarvale Cemetery in Matagorda County. In the wispy remnants of a lifting heavy fog, the workers and Bay City police officers erected yellow police tape around the area and across the service road. The forensic technician videotaped the official record. Outside, television cameras and reporters recorded the event for the evening news.
At 8:15, workers pried up the granite and bronze marker and set it to the side. An iron dowel was forced into the earth until it made contact with the concrete vault two feet below. With a small backhoe, the equipment operator dug down to the top of the sarcophagus surrounding the casket. Workers then dug the rest by hand, wrapped a chain around the two-ton container and pulled it and its contents out of the ground just before lunch.
The tightly sealed lid was forced off the top, leaving a trail of stringy glue in its wake. The coffin was removed, wrapped in plastic and placed in the back of a blue Chevrolet Suburban. Elizabeth Ratliff and the three men from Durham traveled to Meridian, Mississippi, where they stopped for the night.
Early the next morning, they were on the road again, determined to get their precious cargo back to North Carolina that day. The autopsy was scheduled for Wednesday at the state medical examiner’s office in Chapel Hill.
The white plastic-enshrouded silver-gray coffin of Elizabeth Ratliff rolled into the autopsy suite on a gurney at 9 A.M. on Wednesday, April 16. Yellow police tape secured both ends. When the lid of the casket was lifted, the musty smell of old news flew into the faces of the observers. Dr. Werner Spitz, a well-known and respected forensic pathologist, was present on behalf of the defense, along with Investigator Ron Guerette, who always seemed to be everywhere—many on the prosecution side of the case joked about getting him a “Where’s Waldo?” tee shirt.
The autopsy team of Dr. Aaron Gleckman, forensic neuropathologist, and Dr. Deborah Radisch, forensic pathologist, examined the exterior of the body in its coffin. The disintegrating lace of Liz’s wedding gown added a delicate poignancy to the macabre moment. She was surrounded by an array of items sufficient to melt a seasoned and inured heart. There was a book—one well loved by Dr. Radisch’s children—The Little Rabbit, a white stuffed lamb, a stained and broken seashell, a ballet slipper charm and soft brown plant material that once shone brilliant with the color of life.
Opening the book, the doctors discovered a metal unicorn window hanging, a card with a picture of a church in Frankfurt and inside the card, a photograph of two small girls. On Liz’s fingernails, a tired gloss of nail polish blushed in an unnatural burst of color.
Using a mechanical winch and straps, they transferred the body to a stainless-steel table and more photographs were taken. Dr. Radisch was eager to find the answers to the questions that rose in her mind when she reviewed the original autopsy. In twenty years of experience, she had never seen a cause of death listed as a sudden unexpected death due to a spontaneous intra-cranial hemorrhage caused by von Willebrand’s disease. Her curiosity was also inflamed by the absence of any diagrams to indicate the number and location of the lacerations.
The body itself was in an excellent state of preservation. The skin on her face had a layer of make-up and looked quite normal. When the cosmetics were removed, the pathologists uncovered bruising under Liz’s left eye and a laceration on her eyebrow. Even this late, the bruising was distinct. The embalming process preserved the bruising because, although it removed the blood from the circulatory system, it could not retrieve blood from surrounding tissue.
In Liz’s mouth, there was an area of small bruising and a tear on her upper gums. The skin on her body was dark and leathery with a small amount of mold on its surface. Dr. Radisch found evidence of bruising on the back of Liz’s left hand and on her left wrist.
The doctors shifted their focus to the head—Dr. Gleckman’s area of specialty. The multiple lacerations were all glued and sutured in the autopsy and embalming in 1985. He found and described seven distinct lacerations to Liz Ratliff’s head—the same number found during Kathleen Peterson’s autopsy. The number could be mere coincidence, but the biggest surprise was their location. One was on the very top of her head—its position made it more condemnatory of Michael Peterson than any found on Kathleen.
Dr. Radisch removed the thick cotton sutures from six of the lacerations on the head with great care. She then tackled the more difficult task of the fine blue suture material on the remaining laceration.
They observed a distinct fracture along the base of the skull that corresponded to the angled laceration on the top of her head. The fracture traveled from there down to where the spinal cord connects. Inside the skull were flecks of dried blood indicative of a pre-mortem injury.
When Dr. Gleckman and Dr. Radisch completed the procedure, they informed the observers that, pending a neurological consult, they believed that Liz Ratliff’s death was caused by blunt force trauma to the head—the manner of death: homicide.
Investigator Art Holland paced the halls and peered through the windows throughout the procedure. Now, he had a phone call to make. When Margaret Blair picked up, he asked her, “Are you sitting down?”
She answered, “Yes,” but dread surrounded the word and muffled her response.
“Your sister didn’t die from a fall down the stairs.”
Eighteen years of sorrow, eighteen years of uncertainty, eighteen years of loss crashed down on Margaret Blair with the intensity of a Nor’easter. An intense anger at Michael Peterson and a savage lust for justice burned a hole in her heart. She would not rest until the world knew the whole truth of her sister’s death.